OTTAWA
— On a warm June evening in 1959, two kids rode a bicycle down a lonesome
county road in southwestern Ontario.

One never came home. The other embarked on a legal odyssey that still haunts
Canadians 45 years later.

Twelve-year-old Lynne Harper was found in a woodlot near Clinton, Ont., two days
after that fateful bike ride. She had been raped and strangled.

Steven Truscott, 14, a popular athlete and Lynne's schoolmate, was arrested the
next day. He was charged with murder after a single night of questioning and
later convicted.

Tomorrow, Justice Minister Irwin Cotler will announce whether the case should be
reconsidered in light of shoddy police work and suppressed evidence cited by
Truscott's lawyers.

Cotler received an 800-page review of the case from former Quebec Court of
Appeal judge Fred Kaufman last summer.

Police didn't believe Truscott when he said he'd given Lynne a ride up to
Highway 8 and watched while she hopped into a passing car.

The girl's family initially thought it quite likely that she'd hitchhiked the
short distance to her grandmother's place — a key detail that wasn't presented
at trial. Instead, the Crown argued that Lynne was not the sort to take a ride
with a stranger.

The defence never learned that a witness who knew Truscott and Lynne had told
police she saw them bicycle well past the tractor path where Lynne's body was
found. The witness account was detailed enough to describe their clothing.

Perhaps most disturbing, a pathologist who said the time of Lynne's death
coincided with the half-hour that Truscott and she were together later changed
his story. In 1966, the now-deceased pathologist wrote in an article for a
scientific journal that Lynne could have died a full day after she disappeared.

The Supreme Court of Canada, which upheld the Truscott verdict in 1967, didn't
learn of that crucial shift.

Those and other gaps are outlined in two books about the case by authors Isabel
LeBourdais and Julian Sher.

Except for Truscott, no other suspects were seriously pursued even though
hundreds of transient men, including several sex offenders, worked at a nearby
military base.

Truscott was condemned to die by hanging in 1959, a sentence commuted to life in
prison after he'd spent four months on death row.

He has always said he is innocent.

"I want my name back, I want closure," Truscott told a packed news
conference in 2001. "My friends all know that I'm innocent. I want to set
the record straight."

Cotler can dismiss Truscott's application — thereby upholding his conviction
— order a new trial, or refer the case to an appeal court.

Conservative Deputy Leader Peter MacKay, a former Crown attorney, says Truscott
has had to wait too long. "I'm very hopeful that this is going to result in
a full exoneration."

MacKay hopes Cotler will send the case back to the courtroom in Goderich where
Truscott was convicted.

A provincial Crown attorney could then "do the right thing and simply offer
no evidence which will, from a legal standpoint, effectively erase any criminal
conviction for Mr. Truscott," MacKay said.

"And that will allow him to get on with his life."

It's too early to discuss compensation, MacKay added.

"Mr. Truscott, any time I've spoken to him, has never even brought up the
subject."

The Truscott family declined through their lawyer to be interviewed as the last
hours of a long, agonizing wait tick down.

Joyce Milgaard knows better than most what they're going through.

"My heart just goes out to them," she said in a telephone interview
from Winnipeg.

Milgaard's son, David, spent 23 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit
before DNA evidence finally cleared him in 1997.

"He's virtually been in prison for 45 years," she said of Truscott.

Truscott was released on parole in 1969 at the age of 24.

Corrections officials said he was a model prisoner who simply didn't fit the
criminal mould.

Truscott met and married his wife, Marlene, in 1970 and the couple moved to
nearby Guelph, where they lived as Steve and Marlene Bowers — Steven's
mother's maiden name.

The family lived in assumed anonymity, not able to openly associate with
Truscott's relatives or attend family functions.

They raised three children. Truscott has spent most of his working life as a
millwright in the same Guelph factory, a trade he learned in jail at Collins Bay
Penitentiary.

In 2000, his children grown, Truscott reclaimed his identity to plead for
justice in a CBC documentary.

Fellow factory workers and neighbours have joined thousands of other Canadians
in recent campaigns to clear his name.

Lawyers with the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted filed a thick
legal brief in November 2001 asking the federal Justice Department to review his
case.

They cited flawed pathology, shoddy police work and said evidence was suppressed
at Truscott's 1959 trial that backed up his claim of innocence. Police tunnel
vision coupled with the desperate search for a culprit helped corner a scared
teenager, they argued.